Should my website be popular or should it be good

Should my website be popular or should it be good

Anyone building and maintaining a website wants it to succeed – however one’s “success” is measured.

But, clearly, success means for the most part one’s website should get traffic because no matter what one’s definition of success (sales, leads, additional business of some sort), a website with as much traffic as a lonely country road won’t do its owner much good.

So, should my website be popular or should it be good, as in authoritative, filled with plenty of fresh, compelling content which speaks thoroughly of one’s business or organization?

Building a website to rank high in search engine queries is something the pros have long called, search engine optimization, or SEO. Tricks were often used to achieve that high page rank in searches. But those days are, for the most part, over. In fact, SEO is a term (if not practice) that quickly slipping into the short history ebooks of online marketing.

Google, the world’s biggest and most used search engine, has for the better part of the last year and a half been rewriting its search algorithms to both punish cheaters and reward websites with good content – authorities on a given subject.

Matt Cutts, Google’s chief of spam police and one of the leading Google gurus on search, released yet another video last week explaining further how authority – knowledge, well produced and fresh content – is far better for one’s website success than merely trying to achieve popularity. In fact, it will do you well to review all of Cutts’ videos at the Google Webmasters YouTube Channel.

The short version of Cutts’ message is this: well-produced, authoritative content is going to naturally drive more inbound links to one’s website and the number of inbound links will rank one’s page higher in search inquiries based on one’s subject of expertise. Got it?

If you know home remodeling – just for an example – post informative, thorough and compelling content about home remodeling Google crawl spiders will reward you with search engine love.